Email Marketing Metrics Report

Personalization

July 2012 Edition

Personalization is a common technique to capture readers' attention by making the email unique to them. Email marketers typically personalize an email by adding the recipient's name to either the subject line or main message.

How Personalization Affects Open Rates

Lack of personalization and message-only personalization resulted in the highest open rates of 11.5% and 12.7% respectively. With subject line personalization added in, rates dropped to 5.2%, and 3.2% if the main message was also personalized.

Our findings have long revealed that adding the recipient's first or last name to the subject line depresses open rates. Subject line personalization is typically associated with spam, causing most recipients to delete the message or file spam complaints.

Personalization of only the message appears to have a slight positive influence on open rate. This may indicate that recipients are more likely to enable images when they see their name within the message text.

Open Rates by Personalization

Why personalized subject lines are unfavorable: Spammers started personalizing subject lines several years ago in order to encourage recipients to open emails. The method was overused and email users began to associate any such email as spam.

How Personalization Affects Click Rates

The click rate response to personalization mostly mirrors that of open rate. Lack of personalization and message-only personalization resulted in the highest click rates of 3% and 2.5% respectively. Subject line personalization lowered click rates to 1.1%, and .5% if the message was personalized as well.

Emails that were not personalized yielded the highest click rate, indicating that any attempts to make an email more intimate may actually repel recipients from following through on calls to action.